Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text

by Chris Beckett

‘Not a problem. Best to strike while the iron is hot with cases like these.’

  Charles had met the Executive Directors of other Inclusion Zones, and he felt he was beginning to understand the way they saw the world. They were the heads of government of their own miniature empires and everything within their designated Zones came under their control. They were generously paid for this responsibility, at least by public service standards, but in exchange for power and status they had to make a Faustian bargain: they had to keep the lid on things. If a Thurston Meadows child was battered to death by a parent, then, unless she could find someone else to blame, Mrs Richards would be held responsible; if crime, or drugs, or violence seeped out from the Zone into the wider city, she could be the sacrificial victim. The whole point of the Zones was to hold everything in, to keep all that was distressing, unruly and uncouth hidden away behind the Line.

  ‘As you’ll have gathered,’ she said, ushering Charles into a spacious office fitted with pale, polished furniture, ‘we picked up two young men last night who sound like your sort of cases.’

  ‘Mrs Richards…’

  ‘Oh, call me Janet, please…’

  ‘Janet. I’d be pleased to talk later but my first priority has got to be to interview these two men you’ve got in detention. These people have a way of disappearing.’

  ‘Yes of course, I’ll take you down to the police wing myself. Ah, here’s your coffee. Did you want to drink it first? It would perhaps be an opportunity very briefly to…’

  ‘I’ll take it with me if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Yes, yes of course.’

  She led him along a corridor and into a lift.

  ‘We’ve never had any hint of this sort of thing before,’ she said, as they dropped back down to the ground floor. ‘It’s all been completely out of the blue.’

  ‘Well actually,’ Charles said, as they emerged from the lift and headed along another corridor, ‘for future reference, the signs were there to be seen. Have you not noticed the graffitti? Dunner? Wod? Igga? Endless Worlds? That big golden tree? You can see it from the car park of this building.’

  Her voice became several degrees cooler.

  ‘The tree? Well yes, we noticed it of course but I suppose we felt that a lot of young people have cottoned onto that tree thing nowadays. A sort of cult. Not necessarily evidence of actual… um…’

  ‘In fact research suggests that the appearance of tree graffiti is a pretty reliable indicator,’ Charles said.

  ‘As you’ll have no doubt read in the recent circular,’ he couldn’t help adding, for no real reason except to observe the effect it had on her.

  Charles knew from previous experience that DSI people – or ‘deskies’, as they were known by the inhabitants of the Zones – had elevated buck-passing almost to an art form, a kind of dance, and he knew that, within this dance, memos and government circulars played a vital role, like the ribbons around a maypole. Deskies received more information than they could possibly hope to take in – the government fretted constantly about the Zones and could never leave them alone – yet whole careers might hang on whether or not they had read a particular document, and whether or not they in turn had passed it on to others beneath them.

  ‘Tree graffiti,’ Charles innocently added, ‘and indeed Dunner cult slogans in general…’

  Janet Richards pursed her lips and said nothing. She was in a deep hole and she knew it, but shifters had only recently been officially recognised as a genuine problem, as opposed to a mere rumour, and there were still many public officials who questioned whether these troublesome intruders really were what they claimed to be. Doubtless she’d tossed the Home Office circular on warning signs into her ‘not urgent’ tray and given her attention instead to DSI(D) 023/9 (the new target figures for prosecutions of Zone-based drug traffickers), or DSI(P) 032/7 (the requirement to cut in half the number of burglaries committed by Zone residents in non-Zone areas), or DSI(C) 045/3 which was about increasing the number of Zone children on ‘maltreated children lists’. (Or was that reducing the numbers? Did more on the list mean that more children were being maltreated, or did it mean that the system was detecting maltreatment more efficiently? The instructions kept changing! The definition of progress was constantly being revised!)

  ‘Igga,’ said Ms Richards, handling the word as if with tweezers. ‘Remind me, what is it supposed to be?’

  They had entered another airlock-like security door that led to the DSI Constabulary wing of the building and were waiting for a policeman to come and let them through.

  ‘I suppose you could say it’s a representation of the multiverse,’ Charles said, ‘the universe of universes if you like, constantly dividing and branching out. It’s thought the word comes from Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse…’

  But here the custody sergeant opened the door.

  ~*~

  ‘This is the information we’ve got so far,’ the sergeant told Charles, after Janet Richard had headed back to her office to look for the e-mails she’d failed to read. ‘These two gentlemen were pulled in at about 8 o’clock this morning by patrol officers doing a random stop-and-search. Neither of them could produce valid ID and both of them resisted the officers when requested to…’

  The Sergeant talked anxiously on, but Charles had listened to so many spooked-out policeman telling these stories, in so many different custody suites, in so many DSI offices, in so many different Zones, that he pretty much knew after the first few minutes what the Sergeant was going to say. His mind wandered, and he found himself turning over in his mind that meeting he’d had with the young woman at the party at the weekend.

  He hadn’t thought about the encounter all that much, but it occurred to him now that he’d liked her a good deal more than anyone he’d met for rather a long time: she’d been sharp, she’d been pretty, she’d had wonderfully lively, restless eyes. Yet he felt he’d blundered, failing even to register her name and launching off into his usual dreary defence of his occupation, instead of simply engaging in conversation, or even asking her something about herself. Why is it, he wondered, that when I like a woman, I find it hard to let her speak? Rosie, his last real girlfriend, had told him at the end that she couldn’t live anymore in a hall of mirrors with a man who saw nothing but projections of himself.

  He’d been troubled by these thoughts on the way back from the party. And back in his small Montpelier flat, turning away from his mirrors, he’d tried to deal with his agitation by reasserting his commitment to his strange choice of profession. He’d taken out a notebook kept specifically for such thoughts and written the word ‘Marcher,’ at the top of a page. He didn’t know exactly what the word meant, but he was thinking vaguely of the Marcher Lords, who used to rule along the Welsh borders, not so very far away, and he had an idea in his mind of a lonely caste who guarded frontiers, so that the people further in didn’t even have to think about the dangers that lay beyond. That was how he’d chosen to see himself. Yet it really had never occurred to him before Susan’s party to wonder why this particular role, out of all the possible roles in the world, should have been the one he’d settled on.

  ‘Marcher,’ he had written. And then:

  Let us put on armour,

  Let us wear breastplates of polished bronze,

  And cover our faces with ferocious masks.

  Let us be pure. Let us accept the cold.

  Let us foreswear the search for love.

  Let us ride in the bare places where the ground is clinker

  And the towers are steel…

  At the time he’d been rather pleased with it.

  ‘So, um… do you want to see the prisoner now?’ the custody sergeant asked, with the half-anxious, half-resentful look of someone who suddenly realises that he’s been talking only to himself.

  ‘Yes please,’ Charles said, making his voice sound extra enthusiastic in order to make up for his lapse in concentration. ‘Yes please, and thanks so much for the background. Very usef
ul.’

  The truth was that he hadn’t even been half-listening for several minutes there – in fact he’d completely forgotten where he was – but now he dragged himself back into the present moment. There was a linoleum floor, cream-coloured walls (scrubbed, but slightly battered), a phone ringing in a side office, some foolish drunk shouting behind a door. On the desk between him and the sergeant were three separate piles of the various items that had been taken from the prisoners’ pockets. Two of the piles contained a miscellany of cigarettes, dreamer discs, coins, a flick-knife, a lump of hashish, lighters. The other pile consisted of two plastic bags containing a number of small blue spheres.

  ‘I’ll take those two bags off you for our research people,’ Charles said, rummaging in his pocket. ‘Here. I’ll give you a receipt.’

  ‘Good riddance to them,’ said the Sergeant with a shudder. ‘They give me the creeps.’

  Charles smiled as he replaced the cap on his old-fashioned fountain pen.

  ‘They are eerie things,’ he agreed, ostensibly soothing but in reality deliberately winding the policeman up, just as he’d wound up Janet Richards earlier. ‘Did you know they can even reproduce in the right conditions? You can start with a bag of twenty and next time you look there are twenty-one or twenty-two. Or so the shifters claim anyway.’

  Chapter 3

  In a beige consulting room, Tammy Pendant frowned into space and Sarah Ripping watched her and smiled.

  ‘Tammy,’ she mused. ‘Tammy. Tammy Pendant. Who is she, I wonder? Who is she when she’s at home?’

  Tammy said nothing.

  ‘I’ve been introduced to her,’ the therapist went on. ‘I’ve spent several hours with her. So when will I really meet her?’

  Then Mrs Ripping waited, knowing the power of silence, knowing that silence was a vacuum that demanded to be filled.

  ‘Pendant’s not my real name,’ Tammy finally muttered under her breath. ‘My name’s Tammy Blows.’

  Mrs Ripping laughed loudly.

  ‘Oh Tammy, Tammy,’ she exclaimed, ‘you are amazing! You are absolutely amazing! You distinctly told me when we first met that it says Tamsin Pendant on your birth certificate and that that was what you wanted to be called. Because Blows was your stepfather’s name, you said, and you hated him.’

  ‘Well I’ve changed my mind haven’t I? Tammy Blows is what everyone calls me.’

  Tammy tried to keep silent then, but she couldn’t resist adding one more thing:

  ‘Anyway it says Tamsin Delaney on my birth certificate. You people should get your bloody facts right.’

  That made Mrs Ripping laugh even more.

  ‘You are determined, aren’t you, Tammy? You’re determined that no one is ever going to find you!’ She smiled. ‘Mind you I suppose Tammy Blows is quite appropriate really. As in Tammy blows her top! Tammy blows up her foster-homes!’

  Tammy made up her mind not to rise to this – did Mrs Ripping really think she was the first one to mess about with her name? – but somehow she couldn’t quite stop herself from murmuring: ‘Tammy blows off. Tammy blow-job. Tammy blows cock for a packet of cigs.’

  ‘But Tammy blow-job is a name that other people have given you, Tammy,’ cried Mrs Ripping. She came rushing across the room to kneel in front of the slender, exquisitely beautiful, teenager. She seized Tammy’s hand to caress it. ‘There is so, so much more to you than that!’

  Tammy pulled her hand away with a grimace, revolted by the touch of Mrs Ripping’s wrinkled skin, her rank vegetarian breath.

  ‘I want to go now please.’

  ‘No Tammy, not yet. You’ve got another twenty minutes with me, I’m afraid. That was the deal, wasn’t it? That’s what you agreed to.’

  The therapist smiled slyly.

  ‘I say “I’m afraid”,’ she said, returning to her chair. ‘But actually it’s not me who’s afraid, is it? It’s you. And I wonder if you know what it is you’re afraid of? Is it that you are afraid of being with me? Or is it perhaps…’

  She paused.

  ‘Or is it perhaps…’

  ‘Oh is it perhaps that I’m afraid of being with myself?’ Tammy finished her line for her in a rude hard voice: she had been sent to so many bloody therapists, and sat in so many beige-coloured rooms. But Mrs Ripping came scuttling back over like an excited crab:

  ‘Well done, Tammy. Oh well, well, done. That wasn’t easy I can see. That wasn’t easy at all. But that’s the hard part. If you can just hold onto that we’re halfway there.’

  She tried to take Tammy’s hand again, but Tammy wouldn’t yield it. Again Mrs Ripping laughed.

  ‘Now where are you running off to, Tammy?’ she sang out. ‘Come back why don’t you? It’s safe here. It’s absolutely safe. I promise I’ll catch you if you fall!’

  Tammy couldn’t imagine how anyone would want to let their mind come to rest in this dreary room with its therapist sea shells, its therapist pot-pourri, its therapist clock coldly counting out the 3,600 seconds, one by one, that Mrs Ripping had been contracted to provide.

  She decided to turn her attention to the shifter, Slug. He was her project at the moment. He was the focus of her steely will. And he opened up much more interesting possibilities than anything she would find in here.

  ~*~

  She’d met Slug in the Old England, one of the three pubs on the Meadows Zone. She was coming out of the toilet there when he’d come sidling up to her and whispered in her ear, a greasy little Scotsman with a lank ponytail and black teeth.

  ‘I’m a shifter I am,’ he’d said.

  ‘Yeah, and I’m from fucking Venus.’

  ‘No, darling. I’m no’ bullshitting or nothing. Come wi’ me and I’ll prove it to ye.’

  Reluctantly she went with him to a corner where it was quiet and he took out a crumpled envelope from the inside pocket of his grimy jacket. There was an ID card in it with his picture on it. It had a bar code and a chip and a government logo, but it was nothing like the ID cards that Tammy knew, whether the red-striped cards issued to people in the Zones or the plain white ones used in the outside world. The logo was different and so were the font and the name of the agency printed on the top.

  She studied the writing on the card.

  ‘Steven? Is that your name?’

  ‘Aye, but everyone calls me Slug.’

  This made her laugh.

  ‘No’ like the wee animal!’ he added hastily. ‘It’s a word for a bullet. A slug o’ lead. Fuckin’ deadly.’

  ‘Like a bullet,’ Tammy repeated sceptically, for the wee animal seemed much more apt to her, the slimy wee animal that lived under stones.

  ‘Aye, and how about this then?’ asked Slug.

  He showed her a page from a newspaper with a picture of ‘the Prime Minister’ in it, though it wasn’t any prime minister Tammy had ever seen, and then some funny coins that were apparently British but were unlike any that existed in Tammy’s world, and finally a scrunched up TV guide which had a recent date but talked about programmes and channels that Tammy had never heard of. Even the channels that were familiar, like BBC 1, had different logos and unfamiliar schedules.

  For a few minutes, the Scotsman watched her handle these things, enjoying the power they had over her and the power they lent to him. Then, after checking that no one else was near, he produced a crumpled ball of silver foil and opened it up to reveal a single little shiny sphere.

  ‘That’s what we call a “seed”, sweetheart,’ he said, holding it in the shadow of a table so she could see how it smouldered with a cold blue fire. ‘Swallow that and in a few hours ye’d be in another world.’

  And now, with the introductions over, it was time for him to present his masculine credentials.

  ‘See these hands Tammy? I’m no’ bullshitting ye, these hands hae killed three men.’

  Tammy shrugged. In her world men had always killed someone, they’d always smashed someone to a pulp, they were always effortlessly in command of the universe; and the fact tha
t they were living on benefits in a Zone and had a nocturnal incontinence problem was somehow beside the point.

  ‘What’s it like?’ she asked him.

  ‘What? Tae kill someone?’ Slug asked hopefully.

  ‘Nah, I can guess what that’s like. I mean what’s it like when you shift over.’

  The little Scotsman laughed.

  ‘I’ll tell ye all about it, sweetheart, if ye treat me nice. Know what I mean?’

  He must have been thirty or more – twice Tammy’s age – and he smelt like a toilet, but he’d got something she wanted more than anything. Luckily enough, she had something he wanted badly too, something that most men wanted in her experience.

  Only I’ll have to watch it, thought Tammy to herself. All blokes told you they’d killed people and smashed people’s heads in and all of that, and nine times out of ten it didn’t mean anything. But a shifter was different. Shifters could commit any crime they liked, knowing how easily they could disappear to some other place where could never be brought to account. Under those circumstances, even someone as pathetic as Slug could really be dangerous.

  ~*~

  Mrs Ripping was still waiting. She’d assumed Tammy would succumb eventually to her weapon of silence, but the ploy had backfired, for her client had forgotten she was there.

  ‘Well, all right then, Tammy,’ she said at length, rather more sharply than she’d intended, ‘if you not going to tell me where you run away to, then why don’t you tell me what you’re running from?’

  She did not like to be out-manoeuvred, and this made her a little cruel.

  ‘Are you running away from being the child of a rape?’ she asked, counting off the options on her short, leathery fingers. ‘Or from the fact that your mother would have had you aborted if she hadn’t left it too late? Or the fact that your stepfather abused you? Or the fact that all those different foster parents decided they didn’t want you? Our time is almost up now, but think about it for next time why don’t you? What is it you’re running from? What is it you’re so afraid of?’